Configuring multilink ppp using two different carriers

[nelso.camacho]

My customer wants to implement multilink ppp using E1 belonging to different carriers. Before doing that I want to know if it is possible?. Are there any restrictions, warnings, requirements?.

[Richard Burts]

Nelso

I have never done this and so can not speak from experience. But I would think it would work fine. As long as the circuits start on the same router and terminate on the same router I can not see why it would matter whether they were from the same carrier or not. The multilink processing is done on the end routers and nothing in the carrier network does anything about it (or even knows that it is a multilink circuit).

HTH

Rick

[nelso.camacho]

Hi Rick,

Thank you very much for your answer, however I opened a TAC case and the engineer does not recommend this setup, because according to his experience it will cause high latency, error messages and a very poor performance on the connection. The recommendation is to bundle all the serial connections running with the same telco to avoid it.

[network.king]

Hi Nelso,

I would also go along with the Tac Engineer . Because if it is two diff telco , the route taken by the telco might be different and both might have diff latencies and it would surely create some issue for certain applications.

It would be better if you go with the same telco , so that whatever you get it is identical ,might be high latency or errors.

Hope this helps

regards

vanesh k

[vmiller]

You will run into subtle timing differences between the two carrier links. It will have the appearnace of a slow link, with some crc's etc. Testing will not uncover it.

[tdrais]

Even the same carrier many times you can have issues. The carrier has to know when you order these that you are going to run multilink so that they can follow similar paths in their network. Most the time the carriers recommend we put in all new circuts and disconnect the old ones since it is easier on them